Caitlin Woodward

The other day at the office, Andy decided he would spam Lisa since she actually signed onto AIM. There was a full minute or maybe more of alternating keys from Andy's desk (the trick is hold Cmd down, and alternate between V and shift). This minute included Lisa's "Are you serious?!" look, also. The menubar and dock icon slowly counted along with all the messages she was getting. 319 was the final count.

This all reminded me of back in the old AIM days, where we actually used AOL Instant Messenger to communicate, and not some multi-protocol application. This kind of behavior would not stand. The application would actually prevent you from sending a lot of messages crazy fast like that. After about 10 or 20 or so of quick consectutive messages, it would give you an alert to wait several seconds.

But that was not the best part. The best part about the old AIM days was the Warn feature. This was originally intended for inappropriate IMs. Once a chat had been initiated, you had the ability to warn them. Each warning increased the warning level of a user. The warning level was displayed by a percentage next to the screename of that person on everyone's buddy list (meaning everyone who added that user as a friend). As your warning level increased, you slowly start to lose some functionality of AIM. After a while, the rate that you can send messages gets reduced. Eventually, if it got high enough, the user would even get kicked offline for a period of time.

So emerged warn wars. This usually took place between two people. For some reason or another, if one was annoyed or trying to be silly, or out of complete boredom, he or she would start warning the other as fast as possible. As your warning level went up, you would start to lose the ability to warn as fast. It was pretty much a battle of who could do it the fastest. Sometimes a group of people would gang up on one, and that's how the best usually fell. Win or lose, though, it was almost always kind of thrilling.

It was always entertaining as a bystander. I remember sitting there with my buddy list open, and all of the sudden, one of my buddies goes from no warning to 97% to signing off in matter of 10 seconds. "Ope, there went Peter..."

Ah, how things were back then.